Average IQ of MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Stanford Students

What is the average IQ of MIT students? Nobody knows, because MIT has never published an IQ figure and does not test students for one. What MIT, Stanford and Yale do publish is the SAT profile of each entering class, and that supports an estimate: about 129 to 134 for the middle student at any of the three, on the standard scale where 100 is average and the standard deviation is 15. Oxford and Cambridge are different cases, because they select on other tests and publish no IQ either. This piece applies the method from our Harvard IQ analysis to more schools and says plainly where it stops working.

What do MIT, Stanford and Yale actually publish?

Each school files a Common Data Set every year, a standard report that includes the test scores of enrolled first-years. The 2025-26 editions, covering students who entered in fall 2025, report the following.

• MIT: SAT total at the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles of 1520, 1550 and 1570; Reading and Writing 740, 760 and 780; Math 780, 790 and 800; ACT composite 34, 35 and 35. 83% of enrolled first-years submitted an SAT (951 students) and 31% an ACT (353)
• Stanford: SAT total 1520, 1550 and 1570, identical to MIT; Reading and Writing 750, 760 and 780; Math 770, 790 and 800; ACT 34, 35 and 36. Only 55.57% submitted an SAT (1,022 students) and 20.94% an ACT (385)
• Yale: SAT total 1480, 1540 and 1560; Reading and Writing 730, 760 and 780; Math 740, 780 and 790; ACT 33, 34 and 35. 67% submitted an SAT (1,092 students) and 25% an ACT (412); 91.4% of the SAT totals reported were 1400 or higher
• Harvard: Reading and Writing 720, 750 and 770; Math 730, 770 and 790; ACT 33, 35 and 35. 79% submitted an SAT (1,325 students). Its file shows no combined SAT total

Two cautions apply before any conversion. These are scores of enrolled students who chose to submit them, not of everyone admitted and not of everyone who applied, and the share who submitted ranges from 83% at MIT to under 56% at Stanford, where the class entered under a test-optional policy. A published percentile therefore describes the submitters and overstates the whole class. And the national comparison matters: in the College Board's Class of 2025 report, 2,004,965 students took the SAT, the mean total score was 1029 with a standard deviation of 235, and 149,767, roughly 7%, scored 1400 or higher. At Yale, 91.4% of the SAT submitters did.

How does an SAT score turn into an IQ estimate?

The link comes from a 2004 study by Meredith Frey and Douglas Detterman in Psychological Science, which found the SAT correlated .82 with a general cognitive ability factor in a national sample of 917 young Americans (.86 after correcting for nonlinearity). Our explainer on SAT score to IQ conversion covers it in full. A correlation of .82 is strong but not perfect, so the prediction is pulled toward average, an effect called regression to the mean: multiply the student's standard-deviation position on the SAT by .82, then convert back to the IQ scale.

The paper's second study is a warning for elite schools. Among 104 undergraduates, the SAT correlated only .483 with scores on Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (.72 after correcting for restricted range). A selective college has a narrow range of SAT scores by design, and a narrow range always weakens a correlation, which is one more reason to treat a school-level estimate as a band.

What IQ is the 99th, 99.5th or 99.7th percentile?

Many searches ask for these, because "99+" is how the SAT reports its top band. Read as a position in the whole population, they are 135, 139 and 141 on the standard IQ scale. Read as an SAT-based estimate, pulled toward average by the .82 correlation, they become about 129, 132 and 134. The first column is a rank, the second a prediction for someone who ranks there on the SAT.

• 99th percentile: 135 as a rank on the IQ scale; about 129 as an SAT-based estimate
• 99.5th percentile: 139 as a rank; about 132 as an estimate
• 99.7th percentile: 141 as a rank; about 134 as an estimate
• 99.9th percentile: 146 as a rank; about 138 as an estimate

Both schools' median section scores sit at or above the 99th percentile, and the College Board's top band is reported only as "99+", so the true rank inside that band is hidden. That is why the honest answer is a range, roughly 129 to 134, and why any one student's estimate carries a margin of about 12 points either way, the same margin derived in the Harvard piece. Our IQ percentile calculator turns any percentile into an IQ and back. For the average across all undergraduates, see our guide to the average IQ of college students.

Can the SAT rank MIT above Stanford or Yale?

No. MIT and Stanford report exactly the same middle 50%, 1520 to 1570, and a median of 1550. The Yale median (1540) is 10 points lower, about 0.04 of the national standard deviation of 235. After the .82 regression that is roughly half an IQ point, far inside a margin of 12. Harvard reports section medians of 750 and 770 and no combined figure, so it lands in the same band. There is a second limit at the top: the Math 75th percentile is 800 at both MIT and Stanford, the highest score the test gives, so at least a quarter of their SAT submitters hit the ceiling and the test cannot separate them from one another. Our piece on the IQ ceiling effect explains why every capped test behaves this way.

What about Oxford and Cambridge?

The SAT route is not how most applicants reach them. Oxford and Cambridge select mainly on A-level or equivalent grades, admissions tests for many courses, and interviews. Cambridge's admissions page lists pre-registered tests: the TMUA for Computer Science, Economics and Mathematics, and the ESAT for Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Engineering, Natural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine. It says almost no one gets full marks and that there is no pass or fail mark for the tests. Oxford will use the TMUA and the ESAT for 2027 entry, according to a 2026 UAT-UK briefing, and its Foundation Year course in PPE requires the TARA, with a window of 12 to 16 October 2026 that has now closed and the next on 4 to 8 January 2027. UAT-UK, the body behind the TMUA and ESAT, is a joint venture of Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, and Pearson VUE delivers the tests.

None of these tests is an IQ test, and neither university publishes an average admissions-test score or an IQ figure. Cambridge does publish how hard entry is: in the 2025 cycle it received 22,513 applications, made 4,893 offers and accepted 3,669 students, a success rate of 16.3%, with Computer Science at 7.4% and Natural Sciences at 21.8%. We found no peer-reviewed IQ measurement of Oxford or Cambridge students, so a figure for either in the way this article gives one for MIT would be invented. For how Oxford's new test is scored, see what is a good TARA score.

Is there any measured IQ for elite university students?

We found none for MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Harvard or Yale specifically. The nearest evidence is a 2024 preprint meta-analysis by Uttl, Violo and Gibson of Wechsler studies from 1939 to 2022, which we could read only as an abstract. It puts the average undergraduate at about 102 IQ points, says that average has fallen by roughly 0.2 points a year and says it rises with the selectivity of the university, measured by the average SAT of admitted students. It gives no school-by-school figure. The authors also trace the common belief that students average 115 to 130 to obsolete data collected in the 1940s and 1950s. Treat it as a preprint, not a settled result. What an Oxford degree does and does not say about the prime ministers who held one is covered in UK prime ministers ranked by IQ.

Why do claims of 150 or higher keep circulating?

Because the arithmetic is rarely done. To predict an average IQ of 150 (3.33 standard deviations above the mean) from the SAT, the students would need to sit about 4.06 standard deviations above the mean on the SAT, since 3.33 divided by .82 is 4.06. The SAT cannot register that: a perfect 1600 is only about 2.4 standard deviations above the national mean of 1029. A school can be extremely selective, and Yale's 91.4% of submitters at 1400 or above shows that it is, without its students averaging anything close to 150. We could not trace the figures often attributed to MIT, such as 124, 130 or 150, to any test or dataset. Selecting a class on test scores also compresses the range within it, which is why the middle-50% SAT bands above are so narrow. For how rare the high end really is, see how rare a high IQ score is.

What does a school average say about you?

Very little. A school's estimated average describes a group selected on many things, of which test scores are only one; our analysis of average IQ by education level and the average IQ by college major post show the same pattern of wide overlap between groups. To see where a specific score falls, the IQ percentile calculator turns any figure into a percentile, and our explainer on the IQ score margin of error shows why a single score is a range. If you want a baseline of your own, you can take the IQ Metrics IQ test.

The bottom line: the defensible answer to "average IQ at MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale or Stanford" is a range for the three schools that publish SAT scores and a blank for the two that do not. Roughly 129 to 134 for the middle student at MIT, Stanford and Yale, unmeasured for Oxford and Cambridge, and no evidence that any of them averages 150. For how another selective-admissions aptitude test is scored and what its percentiles mean, see our guide to UCAT scores.

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